At alternative summer camp, Iris did an exercise with her campers where she asked them to describe their personal vision of utopia.

"Most of them said, 'there would be no occupation and everyone would be vegan,' or something along those lines," she said. But for her, the vision of what an ideal life would look like is not, according to her, so far off from reality. She described things like having a supportive base, a great home, lots of music and art and musicians and artists, and as her roommate and friend I was so honored to be part of her utopian dream.

And it got me thinking about what I want my life to be like, and in this great transitional period, I have the rare and wonderful opportunity to do pretty much whatever I damn well please. And that's exactly what I'm doing.

Some important updates: I decided several weeks ago on my placement for the fellowship. Achoti ("My Sister") is a Mizrachi ("eastern") feminist movement, uniting Israel's women of color--Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent, Ethiopians, Bedouins, Druze, Palestinians, and migrant workers. It's feminism from a non-western perspective, and in good keeping with some of my previous jobs, I'll be working with some seriously kickass Mizrachi women on two different projects, which I'll explain a little better later on.

First, though: with all the options that exist--and man, does Israel have NGOs!--why did I choose Achoti?

My introduction to Achoti was spent at the first working group meeting of organizations interested in creating a fair trade certification system for Israel and Palestine. I was blown away by the whole thing--the idea of fair trade not just as a novelty but as an alternative economic model, the feminist and environmentalist perspective, the basic idea that the international standards must be adapted to suit the realities of Israeli and Palestinian workers--and I was equally awed to be a part of this incredible process. But all in all, my decision to work for Achoti was, in large part, because of this: after the meeting, I went out for coffee with Achoti's director, Shula, and Clarice, a longtime Achoti activist who is starting the second year of her Ph.D at Yale. When I explained the basics of my program to Clarice, adding that I was in the process of deciding which organization I'd work with, she looked at me seriously.

"I think it's very important you come and work for Achoti," she said. "It's very chic--and I don't mean to take away from the important work by saying this, but I'll say it anyway. It's very chic for American activists to go work with the Palestinians. But we [Mizrachim]--we are invisible. No one comes from America to volunteer with us. It's like we don't even exist, like our problems don't exist."

At this point in my life, I feel like I have a pretty firm grasp of the dynamics of the conflict between, in the simplest of terms, Israelis and Palestinians. What I have yet to wrap my head around in any elegant manner is the dynamic of the other "others" in Israeli society. Besides that, the women at Achoti were just the sort of feminists I love--outspoken, intellectual, and radical. Even to be a fly on the wall in the Achoti House, I felt, would be an opportunity to learn.

Which brings me to now, as I sit here sipping my little glass of arak, thinking about how it is that I'm almost twenty two and just realized that I'm living my life's dream.

I remember the day when I was about fifteen and I ran downstairs to the kitchen in a flurry of excitement, bursting at the seams to tell my parents about my vision of socio-political theatre. Fast forward to last tuesday at Cafe Rojet, next to the clocktower square in Yafo, where Zmira, the director of the Achoti/Arous El Bahr Israeli-Palestinian women's theatre project is telling me (in Hebrew) that she doesn't like the amateur connotation of the term "community theatre" and therefore prefers the term "socio-political theatre". Fast forward to this weekend at Neve Shalom-Wahat Al-Salam, where we kicked off rehearsals for the show with the most amazing group of Israeli and Palestinian women I've ever met.

Rewind through the years of activism relating to Israel and Palestine, and pause at all the times in my life when people have asked me what I want to do when I grow up, and I told them that I want to start a political theatre project.

And finally, fast forward to earlier tonight, when we sat in our closing circle for the weekend. Many of the women spoke about what they told their friends and family about where they were going this weekend, about the incredulity at meeting with "the other", and all of a sudden we all remembered that we were doing something really quite radical, when the truth was that we had such group chemistry that it escaped us almost entirely that there should be any boundaries among us. Someone attributed it to the Mizrachiut, the eastern-ness of the project.

"Stop it," someone else said, laughing, "you're going to upset Lior. She's Ashkenazi."

"Hey," I said, "I'm Ashkenazi too."

Raghda, the Palestinian group facilitator, a friend of Kinneret's from Women and their Bodies, dismissed me. "You're American."

Nuha, a Sufi Palestinian and foster mother of thirteen who practically adopted me during the weekend, disagreed. "You're Palestinian," she said.



So here I am, sipping my little glass of arak, about to turn twenty two and wondering how it is, exactly, that my life's dream just decided to come true.

S